Henry Adams

Major works:Democracy: An American Novel • Mont Saint Michel and Chartres • The Education of Henry Adams

“The voice of The Education seems to come at times from beyond the grave. It sees Henry Adams’s life span as a completed whole, as if this particular man were simply another of those vertebrate fossils lodged in their proper sediment. That the narrator himself happens to be the examined fossil doesn’t, somehow, detract from the sense of persuasive distance; it only adds a certain sharp poignancy to the tone. . . . The book as a whole is neither hopeful nor despairing. It is contemplative, and in that sense bracing.”
—Wendy Lesser, Nothing Remains the Same (2002)

Read an excerpt from

The Education of Henry Adams

Henry Adams

A presidential election was to take place in November, and no one showed much interest in the result. The two candidates were singular persons, of whom it was the common saying that one of them had no friends; the other, only enemies.